The Foreignizing Gaze: Producers, Audiences, and Symbols of the ‘Traditional’

Abstract

Indonesia's private television industry blossomed into a powerful source of national, mass culture production in the 1990's and early 2000's. This essay examines the ways in which producers’ subject position, in relation to global media form and narrative, is transformed, through production processes and conventions, into a distinctive ‘way of looking’. By focusing on the example of a travel program, issues related to the representation of elements classified as ‘traditional’ or ‘ethnic’ is explored. Grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork among the country's TV producers, programmers and station executives, the essay puts forward the notion that the use of global forms and narratives leads to the encoding of a particular ‘gaze’ in popular programming, which positions viewers as foreign to symbols of traditional culture.

Keywords:

• Indonesia
• Media
• Gaze
• Television
• Anthropology
• Travel
• Media Production
• Ethnography
• Media Narratives

Notes

1. The idea of the media constellation, which I have previously discussed at greater length (Barkin, 2004), revolves around the notion that producers create new texts largely through the borrowing and reproduction of linked formal and narrative elements.

2. 83% of advertising money is spent by corporations headquartered abroad; over 90% by corporations predominantly owned by foreign investors (ACNielsen, 2003).

3. The producer, Tati, was an independent, working for different production companies, and occasionally for the stations themselves, in their in-house production departments. Her credits included a number of light entertainment programs, including variety and music programs.

4. Whereas I try to avoid any reliance on, or interjection of, my own content analysis, most importantly with domestic productions, in this case I found it necessary to the discussion of Western-origin forms and narratives, to provide a larger understanding of selectivity among Indonesian producers in borrowing such structures.

5. Although printed travel guides featuring this sort of information are now gaining in popularity, mirroring the sex-tourism industry in mainland Southeast Asia (Prideaux, Agrusa, Donlon, & Curran, 2004).

6. ‘Kampungan’ or rural/‘of the village’ tends to carry a sharply negative connotation, and is very commonly used to dismiss anything thought to be of insufficient quality or in poor taste, not unlike the British expression ‘dead common’.

7. The only exception was an international travel series produced by a small, American-owned production house that was making the show using largely off-the-shelf footage, and was airing it only in Balinese luxury hotels. Therefore all the programs I observed that were actually broadcast on Indonesian national television focused on domestic travel.

8. ‘Asli Jakarta’—a play on the common ethnic affiliation ‘asli Betawi’, which indicates the ‘original’ ethnic group that inhabited the Jakarta region (but see Saidi, 1997). ‘Asli Jakarta’ does not indicate a recognized ethnic affiliation, but rather invokes the dilution of direct affiliations that characterizes many Jakarta natives. I also got the sense that, at least in this context, it indicated that the speaker was above or at least separate from ‘ethnicity’ as a central factor in personal identity.

9. This is applicable for when the host is in the shot; some programs will do multi-angle establishing or expository shots of a given destination or point of interest while the host continues a voice-over narration. When the exposition is completed, we conventionally return to the ‘host and camera’ configuration.